Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (53 page)

A champion in women’s education was Viceroy Duanfang, who had impressed Cixi with his reformist ideas and his ability during her exile in Xian, where he had been the acting governor. Elevated to key posts in the Yangtze Valley, this new political star was responsible for many modernising projects, including China’s
first nursery school. It was he who dispatched the country’s first female students abroad, in 1905. They went first to Japan to study teacher training, and then to America. Among the teenage girls who were awarded government scholarships for
Wellesley College in Massachusetts was one Song Qinglin (Qingling), later Mme Sun Yat-sen and, later still, Honorary President of Communist China. With her was her younger sister Meiling, then a child, who later attended Wellesley as well, and became Mme Chiang Kai-shek, First Lady of Nationalist China.

Many prominent women in the future benefited from the opportunities created by Cixi. One was the first
female editor of a major paper, the
Ta Kung Pao
, in 1904, in which capacity she attracted teams of adoring young men. Educated women launched
some thirty journals to promote women’s liberation, and one,
Women’s Daily
, was apparently the only women’s daily in the world at that time (even though the paper itself did not last long).

In the first decade of the twentieth century the expression ‘women’s rights’ –
nü-quan
– was in vogue in China. An influential booklet proclaimed as early as 1903: ‘
The 20th century will be the era of revolution for women’s rights.’ In a civilisation that had treated women with unparalleled cruelty, their emancipation had begun.

Another key component of Chinese society, the traditional educational system through which the empire’s ruling elite had been selected, was finally scrapped. This hindrance to modernisation – and to Chinese thought as a whole – had been on Cixi’s agenda for some years, and during that time she had gradually established an alternative educational system – and alternative routes to a career, in government as well as in private sectors. So when the final push came, in 1905, this giant pillar in China’s political infrastructure for well over a thousand years collapsed with extraordinary ease. The new educational system was based on Western models, with a whole range of subjects introduced, although Chinese classics remained on the curriculum. That year, after visiting one of the new schools, with English-speaking teachers and uniformed pupils in European-style classrooms, library and athletics room, Sarah Conger pondered in amazement, ‘
What will be the future of China when these hundreds and hundreds of educated young people go out from these schools as a leaven into its vast population?’ Three years later, the number of such schools, not all of them so well equipped perhaps, was in five figures.

Young people studying abroad received either scholarships or
incentives such as the promise of desirable jobs when they returned with satisfactory qualifications. At the beginning, many were reluctant to go, especially the sons of elite families, who found life without troops of servants unimaginable. But anyone who aspired to be an official was told to go, to travel if not to study, and in 1903 being abroad for at least several months was made a mandatory qualification for future posts. An edict from Cixi also ordered existing officials to travel abroad, which, she said, was something that had ‘only advantages and no drawbacks’. The number of students studying overseas soared.
In Japan alone, in the early years of the century, they were estimated at something approaching 10,000.

With new education and new thinking, young Han Chinese began to question and reject the Manchu rule, and their publications were full of outcries in this vein: ‘The Manchus are foreigners who invaded China and have dominated us Hans for 260 years! They conquered us by slaughtering, and brought us disasters for which we had to pay the price! They force us to wear “pig tails”, and make us a laughing stock in London and Tokyo . . .’ After the list of grievances came the inevitable battle cry: ‘Drive out the Manchus! China for the Han Chinese!’ In 1903, a devastatingly anti-Manchu essay,
The Revolutionary Army
, by one Zou Rong, appeared in a newspaper in Shanghai. Calling Cixi ‘a whore’, the essay vehemently advocated the overthrow of the Manchu government. ‘Expel all Manchus who live in China, or kill them for revenge,’ it cried; not least: ‘Slay the Manchu emperor!’ The essay infuriated the Manchu grandees, including the most open-minded reformers, and quite possibly Cixi herself. By the Qing legal code, these incitements amounted to high treason, punishable by some gruesome form of death. Even the dedicated reformist Viceroy Duanfang, who was a Manchu, wanted the author ‘extradited’ from Shanghai (which, as a Treaty Port, was governed by Western laws) and punished with life imprisonment, if not death. Shanghai turned down the request for extradition, and Zou was tried
in situ
by a largely Western panel, with the Chinese government represented by a lawyer. Judged against a Western law to do with sedition by word and not by deed, in mid-1904 the author was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and hard labour in a Western-style jail. The newspaper was banned.

This cause célèbre was a lesson to all. Extremist writers felt the need to tone down their language. The prison in Shanghai, though not a hell-hole like most in China, was far from pleasant, and Zou, in poor health and unable to sleep, died within a year. For Cixi, the case provided much food for thought. She was faced with a new challenge: how to deal with hitherto unthinkable expressions akin to blasphemy in the rapidly expanding press. To treat them as treason and to deal with them by the old laws would be to turn back the clock, and she rejected the option.
She refused to listen to those who advised suppression or recommended stopping sending students abroad, where they learned all manner of heresy. She chose instead to regulate the press with laws and regulations based on Western and Japanese models – and these were gradually introduced. As a result, the new century witnessed an explosion of Chinese-language newspapers and journals.
Hundreds of titles sprang up in more than sixty locations around the empire. Anyone could start a newspaper, if they had the funds, and no one could silence them.
General Yuan, as the Viceroy of Zhili based in Tianjin, was mercilessly assailed by the most influential newspaper there, the
Ta Kung Pao
, and, much as he hated it, he was unable to shut it up. All he could do was order government employees not to buy the paper, and the post office not to deliver it. Both measures were unsuccessful and only served to increase the paper’s circulation. Cixi’s tolerance of attacks on her government – and on herself – as well as her willingness to permit a diversity of viewpoints were unmatched by any of her predecessors – or, arguably, her successors.

Along with the introduction of unimagined freedoms, Cixi began to revolutionise China’s legal system. In May 1902, she decreed a wholesale review of ‘
all existing laws . . . with reference to the laws of other nations . . . to ensure that Chinese laws are compatible with those of foreign countries’. With a legal reform team headed by a remarkable mind, Shen Jiaben, who had a comprehensive knowledge of traditional laws and had studied several different Western codes, a brand-new legal structure based on Western models was created in the course of the decade, covering a whole range of commercial, civil, criminal laws and judicial procedures. Cixi approved the team’s recommendations and personally decreed many landmark changes. On 24 April 1905, the notorious ‘
death by a thousand cuts’ was abolished, with a somewhat defensive explanation from Cixi that this horrific form of execution had not been a Manchu practice in the first place. In a separate decree,
torture during interrogation was prohibited. Up to that point it was universally regarded as indispensable to obtain confessions; now it was deemed ‘only permissible to be used on those whom there was enough evidence to convict and sentence to death, but who still would not admit guilt’. Cixi made a point of expressing her ‘loathing’ for those who had a penchant for torture, and warned that they would be severely punished if they failed to observe the new constraints. Prisons and detention centres were to be run humanely; the abuse of inmates would not be tolerated. Law schools were to be set up in the capital and provinces, and law studies were to be made a part of general education. Under her a legal framework began to be constructed.

In a less obviously groundbreaking development, commerce was made respectable. Although paradoxically the Chinese loved making money, the culture traditionally held commerce in distaste and ranked it at the bottom of the professions (the order of prestige being: scholar-officials, peasantry, craftsmen, and – lastly – merchants). In 1903, for the first time in its history, China had a
Ministry of Commerce. A series of imperial decrees offered precisely defined inducements for aspiring entrepreneurs to ‘form companies’, whose registration local governments were told to grant ‘instantly, without a moment of delay’. One such incentive ran: ‘Those who raise
50 million yuan worth of shares are to be appointed First-grade Adviser to the Ministry, with First-grade official status, and be awarded the special Imperial Double-dragon gold medal, with their male descendants inheriting a Third-grade Advisory post in the Ministry for three generations.’ Further incentives were given for merchants to attend
expositions abroad and to identify new products for export.

The many other developments included the establishment of the state bank in 1905, followed by the birth of a national currency, with the ‘yuan’ as the unit. The system is still in use today. The great north–south artery, the Beijing–Wuhan Railway, was completed in 1906. An embryo network of railways was in place. The army and navy acquired new HQs, two grand European-style turn-of-the-century edifices with oriental features. Designed by a Chinese architect, they are among the most interesting buildings in Beijing. It is said that
Cixi footed the bill herself. Perhaps she was atoning for having taken money from the navy in the past.

As the Chinese were adopting a whole range of new ways to live, the old habit of opium-smoking finally started to decline. Half a century had gone by since the country was forced to legalise the drug, and a large part of the population – officially estimated at ‘
nearly 30 or 40%’ – was taking some opium. A stereotypical image of the Chinese in the West was filthy and contemptible faces in foul opium dens: a most unfair portrayal, considering the origin of their addiction. Chinese anxious about the state of their country had been tirelessly advocating a ban; so had Western missionaries. Foreign opium imported into China was chiefly produced in British India and shipped solely from British ports. Public opinion on both sides of the globe was overwhelmingly in favour of prohibiting the trade. In mid-1906 the British Parliament debated the issue, and the mood of the country so excited the Chinese minister in London that he wrote home at once: ‘
If we show we are serious about prohibition, I am certain Britain will be deeply sympathetic and will act in collaboration with us.’ Seizing this opportunity, Cixi announced her intention to
eradicate opium production and consumption in China within ten years. In the decree she expressed her revulsion towards the drug, and described the damage it was doing to the population. A detailed ten-point plan was drawn up, to enable all people in the empire under the age of sixty to kick the habit. (Those over sixty were deemed to lack the physical strength needed for this strenuous process.) The effect of the edict ‘on the nation’,
observed H. B. Morse, who was in China at the time, ‘was electrical’. Farmers stopped cultivation with little resistance. ‘Smokers abandoned the habit by millions; it became unfashionable to smoke in public; and the young were constrained not to acquire the habit. Many millions continued, of course, to smoke, but a generation of Chinese is growing up of whom few have acquired this habit . . .’

A request was put to Britain to bring the opium trade to an end. And the
British government readily responded. In line with Cixi’s ten-year programme, it agreed to restrict opium export from India by one-tenth each year. Both Britain and China regarded this as a ‘great moral movement’, and each willingly bore a considerable loss of revenue. At the end of ten years the eradication of opium-smoking and production in China had made astounding progress, and the British export of opium had come to a complete stop.

Great changes chased after one another like ocean waves. Chinese who did not live in the Treaty Ports enjoyed many a ‘first’ in their lives: the first street lighting, first running water, first telephone, first colleges of Western medicine (to one of which Cixi donated 10,000 taels), first sporting event, first museums, first cinemas, first zoo and public park (a former royal park in Beijing) and the first government experimental farm. Many read their first newspapers and magazines, and a pleasurable habit of reading the daily paper was being formed.

Cixi experienced quite a few ‘firsts’ herself. One day in 1903, she asked Louisa Pierson whether her daughters knew how to take photographs, as it would cause a storm ‘to allow a male photographer into the Palace’. Louisa Pierson informed Cixi that one of her sons, Xunling, had studied photography while abroad and had brought back good equipment from Europe – and perhaps he could take pictures of Her Majesty. Although a man, Xunling was Louisa’s son and could be treated as ‘family’. He became the only photographer ever to
take photographs of Cixi.

Later, the Dutch-American painter
Hubert Vos claimed to have photographed Cixi, in addition to painting her – a claim that is generally assumed to be true. In fact, there is no record of any kind to support his vaguely told story. Nor does it seem likely, given that he was an adult man, and a foreign man at that. Even Robert Hart, who had served the empress dowager for decades, only had a few formal meetings with her, the longest of which, in 1902, lasted twenty minutes. It was a memorable occasion and
Hart recorded it:

The old lady talked in a sweet feminine voice, and was very complimentary: I said there were others quite ready to take my place, but she rejoined that it was myself she wanted. Among other things she referred to the Coronation [of King Edward VII] and said she hoped His Majesty would enjoy all happiness. Apropos of railway travelling she said with a laugh that she began to think she would enjoy even a foreign tour!